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Jim Carrey is the latest celebrity to get sucked into the non-fungible token craze with the purchase of digital art piece that has direct ties to the Soviet Union.
Outbidding others, Carrey, 60, paid 20.0Ξ — which equates to $39,535 — for an NFT titled “Devotion.” The work is one of “The Wild Within” series (which consists of 13 NFTs in total) by artists Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell, who capture abandoned buildings from the USSR.
The image shows a dilapidated Soviet-era sanatorium in Georgia — specifically, the once-famed Tskaltubo resort, which was a popular health destination known for its therapeutic waters.
“This one stops me. James Joyce said that’s a good thing. Thank you @ryankoopmans for gently capturing nature’s exquisite and relentless reinvention. BTW you’re my first NFT,” Carrey revealed in a Twitter post.
The Canadian-Dutch artist Koopmans told The Post of his excitement to learn that Carrey was the one that purchased his piece.
“It is very exciting to learn that Jim Carrey was the collector, as I greatly respect him as a multidisciplinary artist!” Koopmans said. “Jim Carrey is an awesome painter, illustrator and artist in his own right. It’s fun that someone who champions creativity, positivity and mindfulness connected with the work that Alice and I created over several years and is therefore very close to my heart.”
As for the former resort, according to the description of the piece, “between the 1940s to 1980s thousands of people visited, including Stalin and his high-ranking officials from Moscow. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the buildings were deserted and fell into disrepair.”
Since the early 1990s, the buildings have been slowly dismantled and stripped of their valuable materials, leaving empty shells of what were once grandiose classical structures.
Over the last several years, Koopmans visited the region photographing the ruins. With Wexell, they took these photographs, and digitally transformed them into a work of art by manipulating the lighting and structure, adding sound by Erik Thome, and animating the scenes with the intention of reviving the empty spaces.
The goal, according to the Koopmans was “essentially bringing life back into the rooms.”
Shortly after purchasing his first NFT, the Grammy-winning and Academy Award-nominated comedian purchased another NFT titled “Nuclear Taco Trucks.”
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